Annals of Anthropological Practice最新文献

As generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) emerges as the latest technological gold rush, this preliminary study examines how entrepreneurs made sense of this transformative moment in the early months of ChatGPT. Through semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs adopting GenAI, observations of AI creators in Silicon Valley, and computational analysis of our qualitative data, as well as Twitter discourse, we reveal a complex reality beneath the media hype. While Twitter discourse initially showed entrepreneurs aligning with techno-optimistic expectations of their imagined audience, our ethnographic data exposed deeper tensions around job displacement, bias, privacy, alignment, and the more significant ethical and societal implications. The contrast between publicly oriented Twitter data and self-reflective ethnographic data exemplifies the complex ways that entrepreneurs wrestle with their identity as innovators—a tension between public displays of optimism and internal grappling with uncertainty around AI. Drawing on Madsen et al.’s concept of productive friction, we employ this framework in two complementary ways: as an analytical lens for understanding entrepreneurs’ cognitive dissonance and as a methodological principle that deliberately generates tensions through the use of traditional and computational approaches. We argue that these contradictions serve as constructive catalysts for more thoughtful innovation and adoption of Gen AI by forcing critical examination of assumptions and practices. Our mixed-methods approach, therefore, demonstrates a way to capture, analyze, and understand emerging productive frictions surrounding implications for entrepreneurship while contributing to emerging techno-anthropological discourse and approaches for studying technological transformation.

In the past two decades, medical anthropology has increasingly turned its attention to the global, including ethnographic fieldwork at global health mega-events and the processes behind global health initiatives. Similar developments have taken place in political and legal anthropology, with researchers looking at United Nations organizations, transnational epistemic communities, and other global sites of policy-making. Ethnographic methods have also become popular in International Relations, particularly in research on diplomatic practices. Despite the need for and interest in ethnographic research on global health diplomacy, governance, and politics, there are practical and ethical challenges to doing fieldwork in “global” spaces. In this essay, I discuss defining and accessing the field, everyday life in the field, and ethical challenges. I draw upon examples from over a decade of fieldwork at and around the World Health Organization (WHO). I also discuss how other ethnographers have approached global health diplomacy, governance, and politics.

Despite being key to China's economic development, micro and small enterprises have long faced difficulties in accessing bank financing. Consequently, the government has introduced digital lending platforms like “Credit Easy Loan” to enable “creditworthy” microentrepreneurs to obtain collateral-free loans. These platforms are expected to collect and integrate social credit data, thus easing the information asymmetry between banks and private enterprises. Based on 10 months of fieldwork in two Chinese cities, this paper investigates banks’ digital and nondigital credit assessment practices and the varied experiences of business loan applicants. It finds that banks and microentrepreneurs may work with underground intermediaries to manipulate application material for different purposes. Microentrepreneurs, especially those without local tangible assets or social networks, still face credit constrains, and discrimination in loan applications. This paper hopes to further our understanding of the social practice around digitalized credit and the dynamics between financial inclusion policies and local implementation.

Ethnographic field schools provide students a real-world experience in data gathering, analysis, and report writing. The field sites themselves become a key element in the learning process as students move out into the field with increasing confidence through the weeks of the program. The people and communities they encounter are both affected by and affect this interchange of local knowledge and cultures with students whose backgrounds are usually quite different. Veteran program leaders bring their own knowledge of the student learning process to the field site where they have made connections with community members to facilitate the entire process. Their role makes it more likely that successful outcomes will last well beyond the season's fieldwork. This issue of Annals of Anthropological Practice features several examples of the long-term benefits, that is, the legacy, of ethnographic field schools. They illustrate different field school models, all with positive, long-term legacies, often with applied and praxis components. In this paper, I discuss the outcomes of my field school programs and why the ethnographic field school is, or should be, a vital component of not only graduate, but also undergraduate programs. My immediate frame of reference for this paper is the 17 years of programming in Guatemala, but I have done 10 more seasons in other places (Hungary, Costa Rica, and Colombia). My path to lead these programs was heavily influenced by the legacies of other colleagues, both before me and those whom I met while doing my own program, including some of the authors in this issue.

Brigham Young University hosted a long-term undergraduate ethnographic field school in Guatemala. Among its achievements are the publication of five peer-reviewed publications in which the central chapters were written by the young scholars. This essay provides an overview of that program and its legacy for the participants and the communities involved. We also discuss the relevance of publication-oriented field schools to improve undergraduate education and strengthen the discipline.

Celiac, an incurable autoimmune disease, affecting roughly 1% of the US population, requires an unusually high level of vigilance with respect to diet and food preparation in order to keep foods and the environments of their preparation gluten-free. Compliance with this strict regimen, while alleviating many long-term side effects such as cancer and osteoporosis, often leads to other problems such as social anxiety, depression, and eating disorders, according to a variety of studies. My research, conducted with gluten-free business owners from around the United States, who identify as having celiac, looks at the role these businesses play with respect to the management of celiac. It asks if these businesses are a means of forming “biosocial groups” like those that have formed around other genetic conditions. While these business's websites and physical spaces have functioned to some extent, in the past, as locations in which informal support groups have formed and have been hubs for the dissemination of relatively complex knowledge about diet and aspects of this disease, at present they offer other benefits, including the revaluation of the celiac suffer and have become a means of linking those with celiac to those who do not have this disease. This research fits within contemporary disability research in that it looks at the creative ways that disease and disability are met with innovative practices to construct inhabitable worlds.

This article discusses the legacies of the Open School of Ethnography and Anthropology (OSEA) field school programs and projects. OSEA was founded in 2003 in Pisté, Yucatán, Mexico, and continues to offer an array of programs to undergraduates, graduate students, non-students, and scholars. OSEA emerges out of a prior field school program (1997–1999). The article considers the difficulties of how to assess the intangible, immeasurable legacies of field schools, provides a history of OSEA and its precursor, and concludes with a view toward future development.